From the rapid expansion of railways in the late nineteenth century up until the mid-twentieth century, rail was the predominate method of overland transportation for freight in North America. The post-Second World War construction of an extensive network of high-speed highways transitioned substantial amounts of freight movement to trucking, and trucking has dominated as a transportation method for many categories of freight until the present. In recent years, however, a number of factors have had a negative effect on long distance trucking. First, as fuel costs have risen, the cost advantage has shifted to rail, which uses up to 70% less fuel per ton-mile. Secondly, because of the need to be away from home for several days at a time, younger drivers are not being attracted to these jobs and the age profile of truck drivers is steadily increasing. Together with the physical demands of the job, competitive pressure to exceed legally-imposed limits on daily driving hours and safety issues after driving many hours, labor shortages are beginning to appear. Finally, a recent trend toward state legislation imposing large fines for excessive carbon and particulate emissions, enhanced by the desire of corporate and government clients to show their stakeholders reductions in greenhouse gases, has made trucking both more costly and less desirable.
In contrast, rail shipping has much lower fuel costs, uses far fewer drivers and has a far superior safety record.
Railroad cars, commonly referred to as “boxcars”, were the original method used for rail freight. Generally, boxcars are unloaded at relatively large terminal facilities including a cross-dock area and warehousing space. Freight is unloaded by forklift, stored temporarily, and then moved again to surface-road transports, such as semi-trucks. In the case of refrigerated or freezer freight, there are few facilities that can provide this specialized storage on rail.
In recent years, very few facilities for hardy produce have been built, and then only for specific shipping corridors; e.g., California and Texas to the U.S. East Coast. These rail terminals comprise elaborate indoor facilities occupying many acres so as to accommodate multiple railroad car trains at once. At present there is only one operator serving coast to coast hardy produce, and rail only accounts for a very small percentage of these kinds of movements. Moreover, such facilities are expensive to build. As there are very few of these terminal facilities, transport trucks have to drive significant distances to load and unload freight, making intermodal transportation of such freight by train less cost-effective.
Over time, the railroad industry has expanded the types of freight carrying vehicles to better accommodate the variety of freight being transported. The use of multi-purpose, intermodal shipping containers is one example. Such intermodal containers, which are essentially rectangular storage containers with one or more loading/unloading openings permitting access to interior storage areas, are configured to be stacked for ship-borne transportation, to be individually loaded atop flatbed trailers, or chassis, and driven via surface roads by transport truck, and to be individually loaded atop railroad well cars for transport by train. In an exemplary shipping scenario, such intermodal containers may be (i) loaded with freight at a manufacturing facility, (ii) the loaded intermodal containers placed on chassis and driven via surface roads to dockside where (iii) the intermodal containers are removed from the chassis and loaded onto a ship for sea-borne transport. When the ship arrives at its destination, the intermodal containers are unloaded and placed, individually, on chassis for movement via surface roads by transport truck. While some such intermodal containers will travel by truck to their ultimate destinations, others of these intermodal containers will travel to intermodal terminals where they are placed, individually, on railroad well cars for shipment by train to a remote intermodal terminal where, once again, the intermodal containers are removed from the railroad cars and placed on chassis for truck transportation via surface roads to their ultimate destinations, where the freight is unloaded.
While intermodal containers enable the freight being shipped to be loaded once at the manufacturing facility or other initial destination and unloaded at the final destination, this advantage comes at a cost. Weight restrictions on surface-road transport (such as semi-trucks, etc.) are lower than the physical limitations of the intermodal containers and, moreover, are lower than the weight restrictions placed on railway transportation. For instance, intermodal containers may have a rail payload limit of approximately 58,000 to 60,000 pounds, but a net weight limit for surface road transportation of roughly 44,000 pounds or less when full (after taking into account the weight of the surface-road transport). To complicate matters further, these weight restrictions on surface-road transports vary from state to state in the U.S., meaning that shipments traversing multiple states must meet the lowest applicable weight restrictions of the states through which the freight is being transported. Given the foregoing, some of the advantages of intermodal containers are lost as those containers are generally transported via rail at or below their capacity for the longest leg of the transportation.